Cold War - Jerome Preisler [59]
Had to be fourteen at least.
His computer appeared to have hung, just as it had last night. Lowry picked up his cola and reached to reboot. Just as his fingers touched the keyboard, the cursor began running across the top of the screen.
ACCESS ACHIEVED. DUMPING DRIVES C:, D:, E:.
“No shit,” said Lowry. He leaned back in his swivel chair and gulped the last bit of the soda. Then he tossed the can and slid back the keyboard. “Let’s have a look at our sweetheart’s life, eh?”
Besides the normal systems programs—Windows ME, definitely an amateur—and office suites, the hacker chap had a good store of perv pix-nudie shots that confirmed for Lowry that he was indeed dealing with a teenage boy. There were a number of word-processing files that looked like German to his admittedly unfamiliar eye. He flipped through a few, took a look at some more of the porn, and then found a directory of the standard plug-and-play hacker scripts that allowed so many idiot brats to pretend they were true geeks.
But it was when he started to examine the contents of the lad’s D: drive that things got interesting.
The chap liked to break into e-mail systems. He had accessed a Fleet Street newspaper, which included quite a few off-color remarks about the Queen. He’d also gotten into UKAE, the regulatory agency for British nuclear power. Lowry glanced through the texts, which were run together with the headers indicating when they had been sent. He was on the second page and giving thought to returning to the nudies when a message in the middle of the page caught his attention.
“Eliminate Ewie Cameron. Set up as an accident. L (POUNDS) 100,000. CB.”
The Highland Camerons were not the most renowned family in northern Scotland, but they were well known enough to have been included in several of the lectures on local history Lowry had attended over the past few months on the days he kept his mom company in Inverness; the Cameron estate was located about a mile from her home.
As Lowry continued to read the messages, he picked up the phone and called his supervisor.
TEN
MOUNT EREBUS (77°53’ S, 167°17’ E) BULL PASS, ANTARCTICA MARCH 12, 2002
HIGH ABOVE ROSS ISLAND, THE VOLCANO’S FULMINATING lava lake seethed and bubbled and abruptly shot a dollop of molten rock into the sky with a belch of pressurized gas. Trailing smoke and licks of flame, the red-hot ejecta hurtled toward the rim of the summit cone, and over it, and then smacked into the mountainside a mile away. It was larger than a howitzer round, and its ballistic impact threw a cloud of ash, snow, and ice crystals up from the crater’s rim.
There the plastery magma bomb hardened in the supercooled air to lay among countless other chunks of igneous debris tossed across the slope.
While signs of the eruption traveled across many miles in this frigid and barren land, they drew only a scattering of attention.
It was heard clearly by National Science Foundation vulcanologists working on the mount’s upper elevations, and produced a tremor that rattled the equipment in their mobile apple huts. Its sonic precursors (vibrational pulses that signal an impending eruption) and signature oscillations (harmonic changes that indicate a discrete eruption, or series of eruptions, in progress) were registered by seismometers and broadband microphones that the researchers had installed and maintained with steady diligence throughout the Antarctic summer.
Ten thousand feet below on another corner of the island, the discharge and resultant concussion would be audible as two dull, thudding blurts of sound to McMurdites who took notice. Few did, however. The continuous volcanic output had never inflicted damage on the station, and was for them little more than background noise.
Eastward across the Transantarctic Mountains, the seismic precursors were detected in instantaneous-wave readouts from sensors on Erebus’s flank that had been well camouflaged from the NSF research team. As the